Aesthetic of Our Anger. Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music Edited by Mike Dines & Matthew Worley
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Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music Edited by Mike Dines & Matthew Worley ISBN 978-1-57027-318-6 Cover design by Haduhi Szukis Cover image by Savage Pencil Interior design by Margaret Killjoy Released by Minor Compositions 2016 Colchester / New York / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia www.minorcompositions.info | [email protected] Distributed by Autonomedia PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, NY 11211 www.autonomedia.org [email protected] CONTENTS 4WORD: AN.OK4U2@32+1984 ...........................1 George McKay Introduction .....................................9 Mike Dines A Blue Tomato And A Packet Of Gauloises..........21 David Solomons Big A Little A: The Graphic Language of Anarchy . 43 Russ Bestley Rival Tribal Rebel Revel: The Anarcho Punk Movement and Subcultural Internecine Rivalries ...67 Ana Raposo The Political Pioneers of Punk: (Just Don’t Mention the F-Word!) ..................91 Helen Reddington ‘Stop the City showed another possibility’ . .117 Rich Cross From Protest to Resistance: British anarcho-punk Zines (1980-1984) as Sites of Resistance and Symbols of Defiance ...........157 Matt Grimes Dirty Squatters, Anarchy, Politics, and Smack: A Journey Through Bristol’s Squat Punk Milieu ...179 Peter Webb Anarcho-Punk in the Republic of Ireland: The Hope Collective .............................199 Michael Mary Murphy ‘They Can Stuff Their Punk Credentials ‘cause it’s Them That Take the Cash.’: 1980s Anarcho-Punk: Ethical Difference and Division...................227 Alastair Gordon Let Your Self-Determination Over-Ride Indoctrination: Dick Lucas, Culture Shock, and the Anarcho of the Everyday .................251 Mike Dines More Than Music? Confusions of Musical Style and Political Attitude in Anarcho-Punk From Crass Onwards . 267 Pete Dale The End Result: An Interview with Steve Ignorant..287 Matthew Worley The Kids Was Just Crass .........................299 Te Free Association Contributors....................................311 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editors would like to say thanks to the contributors and to all those involved in the Punk Scholars Network. In particular they would like to thank Alastair Gordon, Russ Bestley and Rich Cross, and Vyvy for their additional comments, edits and proofng. Tanks, too, to George McKay, whose 4word makes a worthy contribution, to Steve Ignorant for agreeing to be interviewed, and to Dick Lucas for his interview and insightful views into the anarcho-scene. Troughout, the support ofered by Stevphen Shukaitis and Autonomedia has been exemplary; and we are proud to be associated with such an eminent, independent publisher. Te editors would also like to thank those of you that made the movement possible, the musicians, artists, writers and activists. Onwards and Upwards! For Sheila Whiteley (1941–2015) George McKay 4WORD AN.OK4U2@32+1984 That first time in Norwich, Crass and Poison Girls were astonishing, not just to me, but to all the punks who knew about the gig and had turned up, the more so because the bands were so casual about it, wandering around the half-empty hall before and after playing, wanting us, waiting for us, to talk to them. Tey were out front drinking tea – I’d never ever seen bands doing that at the end of a gig before. Music was material to them, and they showed that; the perfor- mance was an object, clearly delineated, which they involved themselves in and then exited. Music hap- pened for a while and then it didn’t happen. Te bands extended the performance entirely and indefnitely, to include the pre- and post-show, the setting up of the PA, the draping of fags and banners and subsequent transformation of the hall, Crass in their problemat- ically paramilitary black garb and red armbands, the George McKay sexy sexless women. Either way I was totally intimi- dated, and deeply attracted. Here were people doing exactly what I thought punk should do, be a force. Tis was me, an eighteen-year-old punk in 1979, having his anxieties that maybe punk wasn’t going to change the world (for the better) after all put on hold for a couple of more years. I’m uncertain how powerfully the sensation lasted. (Occasionally, yes, I can still express that sentence today as: I’m uncertain how powerfully the sensation has lasted.) It was the laying out and laying bare of ideals, culture and event presented in a total package that I fell for in that old barn that night. Nine or ten months later, the same bands played a small hall in Sufolk, a beneft gig for local peace groups. Tere were clashes in the sleepy market town between outsider punks and local bikers, and the bikers circulated around the hall brandishing chains waiting for lone punks to attack. Plenty of people in the crowd – me included – ar- en’t interested in this at all; we want to see the bands, experience the whole Crass & Poison Girls trip, that sensurround gig of music, TVs, banners, fags, uni- forms, wrapped in an unpretentious delivery of the mundane. Disapproving comments are shared as we try to reassure one another, there are sneers at this new mods-and-rockers-style moment, this isn’t punk, we’re here for a pacifst beneft. Te transformed church hall is made a site of extreme rhetoric and cultural produc- tion for two hours. But outside … Te open space of an anarcho-punk gig, where subcultural con- testation and negotiation could sometimes take place, where self-de- termination and self-policing could take a while to work through, operated very poorly for me that night. Six bikers trapped me alone near the train station in the dark after the gig and taught me an un- forgettable lesson about the limits of tolerance and freedom among British youth in the countryside. Welcome to anarcho-punk. Rival tribal rebel revels, indeed. Te late 1970s and early 1980s were an extraordinary period in British social history. Tere were sustained manifestations of violence 2 4WORD from the Northern Ireland troubles, to the Yorkshire Ripper to the Falklands War; there was mass protest from Greenham Common to the Miners’ Strike; there were periodic riots sweeping across much of the country, a socially divisive government, mass unemployment and racism. As a teenager moving into early manhood, trying to fnd my way in the world, it felt like I was in a country falling, or being pulled, apart. All of this was happening under the grand penetrating paranoia of the MAD (‘mutually assured destruction’) discourse of the nuclear sublime of the late Cold War. When you looked out across Britain then, it was tired, frightening, a bit of a dump. With, okay, some great music. It was something like this version of the British landscape that formed the dark palette of choice for an apocalyptic and dystopian sense of the world that anarcho-punk fercely, or crudely, or both, depicted and critiqued. For Matthew Worley the anarcho-punk scene ‘served as a nexus for a range of political movements that included anarchism, feminism, anti-militarism, animal rights activism and the early 1980s Stop the City campaigns that fed into the anti-capitalism and anti-globalisa- tion movements’ of today.1 One can look back as well as forward, and see some kinds of origins of anarcho-punk in the communes move- ment, in the avant-garde happenings of the 1960s counterculture, and in the 1970s free festival movement; this constructs an even more enduring tradition of cultural radicalism, while also resisting a Year Zero reading of punk.